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You Don’t Have to Love Brewing to Love Beer

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of teaching a group of close friends how to brew. We gathered in our host’s driveway like a gaggle of birds flocking to a piece of tossed bread, excited to gorge our brains on malty knowledge, to create and learn all in one very efficient swoop. I’ve taught classes at a corporate level before, slinging SharePoint solutions like a pro, but I’d never taught a class on how to brew. I went crazy with it. I even made a 7-page handout!

You forget, once you’ve fully ingrained yourself in a process, how many aspects of the art you take for granted. As I held up a cylinder full of golden wort to explain hydrometers, sugar density, and original gravity like these were concepts the average person should know about, it struck me how involved and complicated brewing must seem to someone who hasn’t been studying and physically doing it for nearly ten years. I did my best to explain (in less scientific terms) how water, sugar, hops, and yeast eventually become the drink we all immediately recognize, which forced me to reanalyze brewing as an activity, and it’s applicability as a hobby.

At some point, when I was explaining how to troubleshoot a stuck fermentation, and how relatively subtle changes in temperature can result in unwanted off flavors, I realized that homebrewing is a high risk, low reward venture. It requires a significant start up cost, large swaths of free time, and until you’ve done it for a while, results in pretty mediocre beer. It requires a lot of study, a lot of patience, and sometimes, a light sprinkling of luck. It’s clearly not a hobby for everyone.

A strange current undulates deep in the aquifers beneath craft beer culture, an ebb that pulls beer drinkers into production breweries, and a flow that pushes them to gaze upon rows of stainless steel tanks in jaw-dropped awe. The phenomena is unique to beer (from what I can tell); writers do not spend their time inside publishing company warehouses, admiring printers and book binding machines, while comparing and rating fonts. Foodies rarely walk into the kitchens of their favorite restaurants to grab a quick bite with the head chef while admiring his oven. In other fields, such behavior would be bizarre, possibly even ridiculed.

Part of the allure of a brewery comes from novelty; prior to the last few years, the only options you really had to see beer-making in action required generic tours through massive Bud and Miller industrial complexes. Many people who have loved beer for a long time now get to peek behind the curtain, see that the great and powerful is actually the organized and practical, demystify the processes and the people that lead to their favorite drink. General brewery openness to invite the libatious public into their work space shows just how welcoming our little community really is, but comes with an oft overlooked side effect that mars all that generous inclusivity with unintended exclusivity.

The obsession with breweries makes it seem like you have to love brewing if you already love beer. Everyone else seems enamored by the creative side, puppy-love smitten by the idea that beer is crafted by people, not just spawned in bottles and distributed to the masses. So why not you? I’ve heard several friends and colleagues announce, with much dejection, that they “just can’t get into brewing,” or “I tried homebrewing, and didn’t enjoy it,” their voices tinted with frustration and failure. There is an implication that the enjoyment of the product is inextricably tied to the enjoyment of the process, and that you cannot possibly be into one without being into the other. A subconscious malignant trend whispers mean words to the dark, suggesting that people who love to drink beer aren’t “real beer people” unless they frequent every brewery in a fifty mile radius, and homebrew every weekend.

I’m here to tell you that’s all nonsense. In a commercial context, there will always exist two subsets of people: creators and consumers. While there will inevitably be some cross over, in nearly every other modern industry, the lines are pretty cleanly drawn between the two groups. You don’t expect every voracious reader to also be a writer, or study sentence structure and grammar, do you? You’d never suggest someone who enjoys delicious food also learn how to cook every dish they enjoy, Iron Chef style, right? We appreciate the creators because without them we wouldn’t have our products to consume, but trying to culturally tie creation and consumption together will lead to a lot of unreasonable expectations, and possibly some alienating let downs when reality deviates from the prescribed popular path.

It’s OK to not want to try your hand at homebrewing, or to find the process tedious and unrewarding.

It’s OK to love beer for it’s mosaic variety and deliciousness without giving a single solitary shit about how it transformed from raw ingredients to decadent ambrosia.

It’s OK to not want to visit breweries, to not have an aesthetic opinion about stainless steel versus copper, to not really care at what temperature the grain for your favorite beer was mashed.

You can love, respect, and enjoy beer without any of that. You should still maintain a healthy respect for those who do spend their time making beer (as long as they do it well), but feel no shame in not wanting to pack up and move yourself to that side of the beerish world. While it would be pretty difficult to love brewing if you didn’t love beer, never let the culture, or any unspoken trend, suggest the opposite is true.

It’s OK, really, to love brew as a noun, but not as a verb.

“If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.” ― Leo Tolstoy

Comments

Nice post, and I totally agree. I’m interested in how brewers approach making beers, and how their creativity/ideas are reflected in the process, but I’ve never been a homebrewer, for oretty much the reasons you stated above: a sizable money/time investment for mediocre beer. I’d rather do simple ferments, help friends homebrew when I can, and drink reliably good beer.

That’s part of why I included the Tolstoy quote; there is room for everyone and their beautifully myriad onions in the culture, but we need to make sure we’re not being accidentally exclusive in our fervor.

I love to brew, so this post was a realignment of what I think brewing means to other people. Different strokes, et al.

Another branch of snobbery that sadly ripples through our hobby. The people who just enjoy beer probably don’t think too much about the fact that they’ve never toured a brewery until someone with a snifter of Darklord in his hand tells them that they are not true “beer lovers”.

Thanks for setting the record straight. I’m surprised you didn’t turn to the obvious musical analogy being a musician yourself. Don’t play an instrument. Turn in your CDs, iPods, and delete that Pandora app off your phone.

Music was my third choice, but writing seemed like a no brainer, and everyone has to eat (expect for the weird plant-guy that made the news a few years back).

I’ve seen the exact scenario you describe unfold, in person. It’s sad, and I always want to reassure the person that they shouldn’t listen to snobby mcsnifter, because he’s coming from a place of condescension, not love.

In a way, I believe that every beer enthusiast should try home-brewing at some point. It offers you a different perspective of the beverage and, to some extent, it makes you value the work of brewers even more. That being said, I actually think you don’t really need to know all that much about in order to appreciate it. But that’s just me.

I agree. If beer is more than just a passing fancy for a person, homebrewing is one of the best ways to learn the intricacies of what makes good beer good. That said, I don’t think, as is part of the current trend, that anyone should feel obligated to like something relatively technical and complex, when from a drinker’s perspective it’s separate from the enjoyment of the product itself.

I think it’s difficult to really understand how the different ingredients and processes involved affect the product unless you have have some brewing experience, and for most people that experience is not available unless you homebrew. So, I think I agree with Max that if you’re a beer enthusiast, trying to make beer yourself is a good way to deepen your understanding and knowledge of the art and science involved. But there is a difference between being a beer enthusiast and enjoying beer as a beverage, and even in wanting to enjoy good beer without necessarily being an enthusiast. For most people it’s probably enough to know what you like to be able to enjoy it.
As far as music goes though, and this is veering away from the topic, I do think everyone should try to sing or learn to play an instrument at some point in their lives, in my opinion that experience is part of being an educated human being. Music is too important to be treated like a product to be consumed, to just be left to the professionals. So at a certain point the metaphor breaks down.

Great post. One of the problems with brewing is that most people believe the cost of entry is too high. As you note, it requires great patience, and moreover, an investment of time and energy. Most of us appreciate brewing from an aesthetic perspective. We go on brewery tours and see that it is art taking place before us, but we think “I can’t do that myself,” which incidentally, is the same thought we have everywhere from museums to pop concerts. Of course, every artist has to start somewhere. If you love something, you should give it a shot!

Now that I think of it. What you’ve said about brewing can apply to beer in general. Sometimes we get to obsessed on how beer is made, etc. when all you actually need to do is to give a glass to someone and see how much they like them.

Thanks for permission to drink beer unencumbered by any knowledge of the process! It is nice, though, that you usually get to sample some free beer when you tour a brewery, so that may be an enticement to feign interest.